An article in the Sunday Eagle about the strong competitive challenge that Brazil’s Embraer poses to Wichita’s planemakers brought to mind one frustration of flying certain routes in and out of Wichita Mid-Continent Airport: The American Airlines flights operated by American Eagle (to Chicago) and Chautauqua & Trans States (to St. Louis) and the Continental Express flights operated by ExpressJet Airlines (to Houston) all use Embraer regional jets. The flights and equipment help support Mid-Continent service, but it always feels wrong to be leaving or returning to the Air Capital of the World on a plane with no local ties. At least, as the article noted, Wichita planemakers also sell planes to buyers in Brazil.
Some parents understandably aren’t comforted or satisfied by the efforts of day care employees to keep Margaret E. Walker (in photo) from driving, because their children still ended up riding in a van driven by someone who was legally drunk, according to a police report. But the employees of Creative Connections Learning Center deserve credit for calling 911, particularly when they knew that doing so meant they would lose their jobs. “I knew once I call, we’re done,” teacher Lindsey White told The Eagle. The employees also called police and confronted their boss before she left, told her not to drive and attempted to take away the van keys, according to White.
There wasn’t much point to holding a runoff election in Afghanistan after one of the two candidates, Abdullah Abdullah, withdrew. Still, the decision doesn’t add any legitimacy to President Hamid Karzai’s government, which is widely seen as corrupt and ineffective and was accused of rigging the last election.
Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., responded to those who’ve criticized his role in health care reform as partisan and unproductive. “This is not my first rodeo. I know how things can be achieved in the minority,” he wrote in a letter, noting his work on behalf of helping the contaminated town of Treece, securing funding for the national biolab at Kansas State University and keeping terror detainees out of Fort Leavenworth. “But this time, the deck was stacked very firmly against the minority voice. . . . Efforts to negotiate a better health care reform bill had already collapsed when the Obama administration set a rushed and arbitrary deadline for signing a reform bill into law. Despite the fact that compromise negotiations were under way with colleagues who I deeply respect, including the chairs and ranking members of the two committees, it was made clear there were going to be no compromises. Even now, Majority Leader Harry Reid and a select few are merging the two Senate versions of the bill behind closed doors, contrary to the president’s promise that the creation of the bill would be on C-SPAN for all to see.” Roberts concluded: “Rest assured, as the debate — which I expect to get even more heated — continues, you will hear my voice loud and clear. I’ll stand up for what’s right. I’ll offer and support alternative measures that I think make better sense and I’ll continue urging Kansans to share their concerns with me. I am saddled up and ready to ride.”
Good for Congress for deciding to buy out residents of Treece. Lead, zinc and other chemical contamination from past mining operations made the southeast Kansas town unsafe and isolated. Kudos to the Kansas delegation, particularly Sen. Pat Roberts and Rep. Lynn Jenkins, for pushing for the buyout and for standing up for residents who needed help.
The Web site Edmunds.com contends that the Cash for Clunkers program was a costly incentive because many people would have bought cars anyway. It claims that only 18 percent of car sales wouldn’t have happened without the program — so the per-car incentive cost of those 125,000 cars was $24,000. But the White House countered that Edmunds’ claims are at odds with a number of other reviews of the program, including by Moody’s, and by third-quarter economic growth.
Congratulations to Intrust Bank Arena for being selected to host the first and second rounds of the NCAA women’s basketball tournament in 2011. The tournament will be a nice economic boost for the city and will help promote women’s basketball in this area — particularly if Wichita State University or another Kansas team makes the tournament and is assigned to play here. Successfully hosting the tournament also could boost Wichita’s efforts to land the men’s tournament in the future.
An Eagle article about entrepreneur Jack DeBoer’s new leadership role on the WaterWalk development included an interesting suggestion from developer George Laham about a possible Plan B for the project, should WaterWalk fall short of the goal of becoming a successful retail-office-residential district. “I think what you could see work down there is more of a civic district,” Laham said, going on to suggest: “Put the YMCA down there. Give them the river for their programming. Bring the African-American museum in.”
A WaterWalk civic district would build nicely on the proximity to Century II, the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum and the museums farther up the river such as Exploration Place. But the Greater Wichita YMCA has announced plans to expand at its current downtown site. And what about the Kansas African American Museum? “It is nice be thought of as the kind of institution that could help revitalize an area,” executive director Mark McCormick told The Eagle editorial board. “No one would be mentioning us in such discussions if we hadn’t significantly changed our public image. I think Mr. Laham’s idea has merit, but we already have some riverfront property we’re trying really hard to build on. Any move to change sites would have to start with our board, the city, Westar (Energy) and our other stakeholders.”
“It will not be me.” — Gov. Mark Parkinson (in photo), on the identity of the Democrats’ gubernatorial candidate
“We lack a farm team.”— Sen. Chris Steineger, D-Kansas City, Kan., on his party, as he tests the waters to run either for governor or secretary of state
“Instead of a fresh proposal, we got an additional 1,000 pages of government intrusion.” — Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, on the health care compromise bill unveiled by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
The country is facing a 2009 federal deficit of $1.42 trillion, more than three times larger than any annual deficit in history. To get the country in the black for the year, every man, woman and child would each have to write out a check for $4,700. That’s a lot of money. According to the Government Accountability Office, 20 years from now, about 92 percent of every federal dollar will be spent on entitlement programs and interest payments on the federal debt. The federal government has only a few choices: increase revenue (raise taxes), reduce expenses (cut services) or a combination. And Congress is elected by a nation of voters who want to have it both ways: low taxes coupled with generous, federally funded programs. Yet we wonder why the national debt grows. So while the 2009 deficit is a stunning $1.42 trillion, the real question is whether it’s stunning enough to finally prompt Congress to make changes when the economy recovers. — Des Moines Register editorial
Remember Ross Perot? In 1992, he predicted that the federal budget deficit was on track to end the world as we knew it. In fact, the rapid growth of the economy during the following years reduced the deficit to zero. Deficits and debts mean just about nothing anyway — at least out of context. In 1945, the federal debt was 120 percent of the entire U.S. economy. A few years later, the debt as a proportion of GDP had been tamed — and not primarily because of cuts in government spending. Yes, of course — wartime spending ended. But the big change was in the denominator of the equation. Economic growth kicked in big time, and reduced the debt as a proportion of the economy to manageable levels. I’d prefer the government run a larger deficit. With unemployment and underemployment rising, the federal government has to spend more — and the deficit has to be larger — in order to get people back to work. — Robert Reich, RobertReich.blogspot.com
It’s troubling that Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, reportedly is under investigation by two ethics panels for steering federal funds to clients of a lobbying firm that made donations to his campaign. Tiahrt secured $5 million and helped steer another $2 million in earmarks to clients of the PMA Group between 2001 and 2008, while receiving $21,250 in campaign donations from PMA Group during that period. The Center for Public Integrity also complained this year that Tiahrt directed earmarks to a company represented by a former Tiahrt aide. It included Tiahrt among other House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee members “in circles of relationships fraught with potential conflicts of interest, involving former congressional staffers-turned lobbyists, earmarks and campaign cash.”
UPDATE: Tiahrt issued a statement this afternoon saying that the Office of Congressional Ethics asked about the process his office followed for submitting defense-related project requests to the House Appropriations Committee, and that he had fully complied with the request. But he had “no reason whatsoever to believe that we are subject to a House Ethics Committee investigation.” Tiahrt said he takes “pride in our professional and ethical process for reviewing requests made to my office — a process that we undertake to ensure the highest level of integrity is part of all our conduct.”
A public health insurance plan appeared dead two weeks ago, but both House and Senate Democratic leaders announced this week that their reform bills would include the option. The comeback may be fueled by opinion polls showing that a majority of the public wants a public option. Fifty-seven percent of Americans favor a public insurance option, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll. Support among doctors is even higher — 63 percent favor giving patients a choice that would include both public and private insurance, according to a survey released last month. Overall, however, the public is still divided on the health care reform bills in Congress, with 45 percent favoring the broad outlines of the proposals and 48 percent opposed.
The Air Line Pilots Association has judged the Federal Aviation Administration to have acted prematurely in revoking the licenses of the Northwest Airlines pilots who flew 150 miles past their Twin Cities destination last week because they were riveted by their personal laptops. Union officials want the FAA to “recommit to protect the integrity” of voluntary safety reporting programs, under which pilots are supposed to be able to disclose mistakes without fear of punishment. That process has its place. But these weren’t two store clerks lost in harmless conversation. They zoned out for 91 minutes at 37,000 feet with more than 140 passengers aboard. To many fliers, the FAA’s swift action seemed appropriate.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got blunt in Pakistan, speaking to newspaper editors: “Al-Qaida has had safe haven in Pakistan since 2002. I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to. Maybe that’s the case; maybe they’re not gettable. I don’t know.”
Meanwhile, a new book by former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe confirms that Clinton came close to being vice president. “I think Bill may be too big a complication,” Plouffe writes, quoting Barack Obama. “If I picked her, my concern is that there would be more than two of us in the relationship.”
It takes a strong spine (or a hard heart) to criticize President Obama’s idea of sending a $250 check to every Social Security recipient — something he wants to do because the cost of living doesn’t entitle seniors to a cost-of-living increase for next year. New York Times economics columnist David Leonhardt noted that because overall prices have dropped 2.1 percent this year but Social Security benefits won’t drop accordingly, “recipients are already set to receive an effective raise.” And seniors may be sympathetic, but they’re better off than some demographics. “The real median income of over-65 households rose 3 percent from 2000 to 2008,” he wrote. “For households headed by somebody age 25 to 44, it fell about 7 percent.”
The whole episode does not bode well for the prospects that Obama and Congress will do something substantive about the unsustainability of Social Security and Medicare. “If the long-term issue is entitlement reform,” said Joel Slemrod, a University of Michigan economist, “the fact that the political system cannot say no to $250 checks to elderly people is a bad sign.”
State Rep. Brenda Landwehr, R-Wichita, and other GOP legislators have jumped on a national bandwagon aimed at opting out of national health reform state by state. “We were created to have state sovereignty,” Landwehr said. “We were not set up to have the federal government tell the states who, what, when, where and how.” But their Health Care Freedom Amendment requires two-thirds support in the Legislature and majority approval at the polls, which can be hard to come by in Kansas. And if the constitutional amendment prevailed and Kansans were protected from federal health insurance mandates, would they find it any easier to get and keep insurance and access affordable health care?
“Former Vice President Dick Cheney has accused the White House of ‘dithering’ over the strategy for the war in Afghanistan. The White House said they’re thinking it over, and they should have an answer for him in six to eight weeks.” — Jay Leno
“President Obama just declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency. A couple of weeks ago, it was like, ‘Calm down, it’s going to be fine.’ . . . Make up your mind. This thing is like the Brett Favre of infectious diseases.” — Jimmy Fallon
“In response to Obama’s declaration, the Republican leaders this morning came out in support of the swine flu.” — Jimmy Kimmel
Two New York Times columnists have offered thoughtful cases against giving Gen. Stanley McChrystal the extra troops he wants in Afghanistan.
Arguing that digging deeper in Afghanistan will weaken the United States, Thomas Friedman wrote: “We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan.”
Suggesting there are better uses for U.S. dollars right now than “inflaming Pashtun nationalism,” Nicholas Kristof doubts more troops will do the trick. He wrote: “We have been fighting in Afghanistan for twice as long as we fought in World War II, with a current price tag estimated to be more than $60 billion a year. Standard counterinsurgency ratios of troops to civilians suggest we would need 650,000 troops (including Afghans) to pacify the country. So will adding 40,000 more to the 68,000 already there make a difference to justify the additional annual cost of $10 billion to $40 billion, especially since they may aggravate the perception of Americans as occupiers?”
If President Obama is disappointed in his point-woman in the House, he wasn’t showing it Monday at a Democratic fundraiser in Miami Beach. “I don’t think people quite understand. Nancy Pelosi is not simply the first woman speaker of the House,” he told the crowd. “I think she’s going to go down as one of the greatest speakers of all time. And she’s very nice and she’s very friendly, but, boy, she is tough. And that’s what you need when you’re putting up with all the criticism and the carping and the griping — and that’s from the Democrats. I mean, you should see what she has to put up with — from the Republicans. So I could not have a better partner in trying to move the country than Nancy Pelosi.”
